Today,
more than 36,000 of our fellow New Yorkers, including more than 15,000
children, did not have the good fortune the rest of us enjoyed.
They didn’t wake up in their own beds, in their own rooms. Instead,
they began the day in City homeless shelters. Thousands more men and women
met the dawn on the streets of New York—because that’s where
they live.

Because New York is
a compassionate city, over the last 20 years, we’ve
created the largest emergency shelter system in the nation. And during the
last City Fiscal Year, our Department of Homeless Services moved a record
24,000 people out of shelters and into permanent homes. That’s something
we can be genuinely proud of. But we also have to recognize a hard truth—and
that is that for too long we’ve focused too much on a crisis management
approach to homelessness, and not enough on finding long-term solutions.

Our Administration is
changing that. In June, we presented an action plan for effectively ending
chronic homelessness in New York City within five
years. And we’ve already begun to make substantial progress toward
that goal. Last week, for example, we launched a homelessness prevention
initiative in six communities throughout the city where the threat of homelessness
hangs over too many families. Called “Home Base,” this program
will work to keep people in their homes, and out of City shelters, by providing
such services as landlord-tenant mediation, substance abuse counseling, or
help with drawing up and staying on a family budget. Because the simple fact
is that while everyone has a right to shelter, emergency shelter isn’t
always the right answer to every housing crisis. Keeping families in their
homes is usually a much better solution for everyone involved.

We’re also making major headway toward our goal of dramatically increasing
the city’s supply of supportive housing, which provides on-site social
services to people who need help getting their lives back on track. Recently,
Enterprise New York, the local chapter of one of the nation’s largest
funders of low-income housing, committed to underwriting development of 2,500
units of supportive housing in our city. This will go a long way toward helping
New Yorkers with special needs, such as the mentally ill homeless, and young
people who are “aging out” of the foster care system. Without
such housing, too many of them could wind up on our streets or stay indefinitely
in shelters.

Openness and accountability
are the hallmarks of our Administration. So starting in January, we’ll post monthly updates on our progress on
this issue at this web site: www.nyc.gov/endinghomelessness. I have to tell
you, I like the sound of that name—because we’re going to do
everything we can to end homelessness in New York City.